Posts Tagged ‘lego’

LEGO Worlds is looking like it’ll become the brick ‘em up folks have been asking for since 1873, with the grand vision of letting folks slap down plastic bricks with their pals and play silly beggars to their hearts’ content. LEGO Minifigures Online [official site] is, well, one of the games that made the long wait for LEGO Worlds so frustrating.

Made by Funcom, LEGO Minifigures Online is an MMO action-RPG where different LEGOMEN are different classes, romping through LEGO settings. After a year in open beta as free-to-play, yesterday it officially launched as regular old pay-to-play offering everything for one price.

Jurassic World is now stomping around cinemas, and LEGO Jurassic World [official site] is stomping around PC too (though our review will be roaring through here later). For those who don’t know, it’s a kid-friendly amalgamation of Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, and the most recent Jurassic World. (You knew it was going to be there. Just look at the name! So telling.) And, oh look — a trailer after the cut!

“Minecraft but with LEGO” is an idea that must have been raised a hundred thousand times, everywhere from playgrounds to board rooms. It’s finally happened. With remarkably little fanfare, Warner Bros. yesterday both announced and launched LEGO Worlds [official site].

Well, launched onto Steam Early Access. Made by the LEGO game folks at TT Games, it’s a procedurally-generated open-world explore-o-build ‘em up with terraforming and rideable creatures and vehicles. Its LEGO worlds do look swish, creating terrain out of squillions of carefully-placed bricks. You know, Minecraftbut with LEGO. It’s pretty barebones at launch, lacking multiplayer.

Knowing full well that playing through a Lego version of Jurassic World isn’t actually the most exciting part of Lego Jurassic World [official site], Travellers Tales has front loaded the latest trailer with one of the most iconic scenes from Jurassic Park. The whole film, along with The Lost World, Jurassic Park III and, yes, Jurassic World, are recreated in miniature plastic for you to explore and build when the game launches on June 12th. That’s the same day Jurassic World comes to cinemas, no doubt to better accommodate any opening night impulse purchases.

Don’t let the name fool you. Lego Jurassic World [official site] may be tied to the similarly titled Big Summer Sequel for marketing purposes, but it covers the previous films in the Jurassic series as well. That means Lego Attenborough, Lego Laura Dern, Lego Sam Neill and Lego Annoying Kids. It also means Lego Goldblum. There will also be dinosaurs, as the trailer below demonstrates.

The simultaneous announcement of two new LEGO games makes me suddenly pained that they don’t let you mix-and-match parts from different games in the way one can with real LEGO [possibly the only capitalised brand name I’ll respect -ed.]. Obviously I’ll want to take the Black Widow from LEGO Marvel’s Avengers over into LEGO Jurassic World to zap raptors with her Widow’s Sting, and yes I absolutely would like to whack Loki with an ankylosaurus’s clubbed tail. Alas, the two games are separate for, one imagines, innumerable legal and technical reasons.

And in “opportunities to teach your child more about vigilante justice using playthings they know and love” news, Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham launched yesterday – you can take it for a spin with a free demo.

I confess I’ve not kept up with all the recent Lego releases. At this point it feels less like a franchise and more of a brick-based pop culture library. Lego are basically the modern equivalent of a monastic scriptorium, where the Lego monks transcribe plots and concepts from television, movies and books and then add illuminated letters in the form of construction flourishes.

If I decide to journey beyond Manchester of a weekend, I might wander as far as Sheffield or Leeds. Maybe a village pub if I’m in the mood for something a little more quaint. Occasionally, I’m even tempted to heard north, across the border into Scotland. Chances are, once I get beyond the front door of my flat, I’ll land in a local drinking haunt though.

A new trailer for Lego Batman 3 shows what happens when Bruce Wayne goes ‘beyond Gotham’. It’s space. He goes to space in some sort of BatRocket. I think he goes to other dimensions as well and at one point Robin Plasticman turns into a fighter plane (which makes more sense – thanks to @rhamorim for correcting my ludicrous error). This is why Wayne is a billionaire vigilante and I’m a dishevelled games journalist. The man has ambition (and bucketloads of inherited wealth).

If you haven’t already twigged that LEGO Minifigures Online was not made with you in mind, the account registration asking for your parent’s e-mail address should clue you in. Funcom’s free-to-play MMORPG is definitely for the little’uns, but I’ll understand if grown-ups fancy a peek. It is LEGO, after all. The game launched into open beta yesterday, so wander on over to the official site if you’d like to visit. You probably won’t want to stay.

I’m always slightly disappointed when a new Lego game announcement arrives and it doesn’t involve a fresh license. Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham looks like a Justice League game rather than a simple spot of the moody Bruces, but I can’t help but feel something other than superheroes would make a pleasant change. Lego Hammer Horror maybe, or Lego Warhammer. It probably doesn’t help that I saw Days Of Future Past yesterday – so many superpowers all on one screen. Best bits? Blink doing the best portals since Portal and Quicksilver doing just about anything. The superheroes from the other place are below.

Lego The Hobbit could simply be called ‘There’ because there ain’t no ‘Back Again’. Lacking the narrative content that will form the final third of the swollen and gaseous film trilogy, this is a perfectly acceptable entry in Traveller’s Tales’ Lego franchise but the release comes at an odd time. The disappointingLego Movie Videogame is barely out of diapers and Smaug has finished his desolation of multiplexes, leaving the game stranded in the wilderness before the final chapter of an unfinished story. Here’s wot I think.

Traveller’s Tales have announced that their next game will not be Lego: Doctor Who by announcing that their next game will be Lego: The Hobbit. Due in Spring of next year, the game will cover the events of the first two Hobbit games FILMS (edited to fix idiocy), which means about sixteen hours of playtime will take place in Goblin Town and the barrel sequence will last until the last embers of our sun have been snuffed into oblivion, like the remnants of a lonely campfire on an desolate hillside. There’s a video below.

As a casual observer of the Lego phenomenon, I am continually baffled by the games. I don’t particularly enjoy the LEGO: Pop Culture Thing third-person smash-em-ups, as I mostly want a creative restructuring of things (though John thinks it’s because I’m made of hate. I assure you the two are not related). Smashing and rebuilding without any control just doesn’t fit into my Lego universe, and while I briefly exposed a nerve of interest when Lego Minfigures Online was announced, Adam’s preview was a splash of cold water that made me grimace. There was a lot of smashy and not a lot of buildy. That’s not to say it’s not in there, but they really didn’t want to talk about it if it is. Ah well, I still have Garry’s Mod and Minecraft, and all other kinds of creative games. If you’re looking for more punchy smashy fun, you can now sign up to the the LMO Closed Beta.Read the rest of this entry »